two things that annoy me...

recently, i've been pondering two things that we should stop doing right now.

the first thing that we must do is stop looking for human hypocrisy in order to invalidate human ideas. what i mean is the trend (not even a little bit new by the way--just perfected) of attacking the person presenting the idea rather than understanding the idea itself on its own merits. i was listening to the sean hannity radio show again the other day, and he was almost giddy with delight about a report he had put together about environmentalists. not about environmentalism, but about environmentalists. he made allusions to some people who talked about carbon footprints or global warming or something along those lines but flew around the world in private jets rather than flying commercial. but, it doesn't stop there. i haven't listened in a long time, but i'm sure that commentators on air america radio are having a field day with the recent spate of republican elected officials having sex scandals. party of family values? i think not. anyway, rather than taking these cases on individual basis, both sides are guilty of making sweeping judgments about (in this case) all people who call themselves environmentalists, but also about the ideas espoused by those same people.

i think this is patently different than questioning someone's motive--say, in the case of profit or power. this is saying because you flew on a private jet all environmentalists are nuts and, oh by the way, your ideas are bullshit. i think that it's important to know who is talking to you and for whom they work. it's important to understand you have to understand the money trail for particular think tanks, authors, lobbyists and talking heads in general. but, it is something entirely different to reduce the substance of someone's ideas to character issues.

the other thing that annoys and is closely related is the manner in which many arguments are framed. i caught the tail end of the neil/neal boortz broadcast one day last week, and i was struck by the absurdity of what he was saying. he was talking about why the consumer tax would never be passed, and he was talking to someone that had called in to the show. anyway, he was saying that the reason we would never see the consumer tax enacted was because liberals in government don't want to give up the power they have over the population. the argument being that the manipulation of the tax code to induce certain behaviors is an intoxicating power to liberals--only. the thing that is preposterous isn't the obviousness of that incredulous lie. the thing that is preposterous is that instead of focusing on revamping the idea, you subvert the concept of the marketplace of ideas (where ideas "compete" with one another, and, as the theory goes, the best idea "wins"). rather than allowing the idea to flourish on its own, you focus on the acquisition of power in order to force your idea down the collective throat of america. you also subvert part of that evolutionary process...the process where ideas come into contact with different philosophies and are changed for the better.

i feel that i've lost my train of thought here...i'll refine and extend these arguments in posts to come. nodnod